When the World Feels Less Safe: Supporting Trans Identity in Difficult Times

If you are a trans person in the UK right now, you may be carrying something that is hard to put into words. A heaviness. A sense of the ground having shifted. Perhaps a feeling that a debate about who you are has been happening at full volume in spaces where your voice was barely present.

That is not a small thing to live with. And it deserves to be named.

What Has Happened

On 16 April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled unanimously that under the Equality Act 2010, the terms "woman" and "sex" refer to biological sex. The ruling means that trans women — including those who hold a Gender Recognition Certificate — are no longer recognised as women for certain equality purposes and can be excluded from some single-sex spaces and services.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission moved quickly. A first interim update followed on 25 April 2025, directing that trans women should not be permitted to use women's facilities in hospitals, shops, restaurants and other public spaces. A revised version was issued in June 2025. That guidance was then withdrawn in October 2025 after being widely criticised as unworkable. In February 2026, the High Court held that the June interim guidance had been lawful. The EHRC then revised its full Code of Practice following consultation, and that draft Code was laid before Parliament on 21 May 2026. It is not yet in force — but the direction of travel is clear.

To put it plainly: under this framework, trans women are expected to use men's facilities, or gender-neutral ones where they exist. The EHRC's own language throughout this process — describing trans women as "biological men" — reflects a framing that many trans people, and many clinicians who work with them, find both inaccurate and harmful.

I want to be clear about where I stand. This guidance is, in my view, harmful to trans people. It does not reflect clinical understanding of gender identity. It creates conditions that increase the risk of harassment, distress, and the very real danger of being outed in public spaces. The framing that this is simply a matter of "clarity" for service providers does not account for what it costs the people it directly affects.

The Human Cost

Legal and policy documents don't carry the weight of what it feels like to read them. But trans people are reading them. And the impact is real.

For many, this period has brought a resurgence of experiences they know well: the exhaustion of being seen as a problem to be managed, the grief of watching hard-won recognition be walked back, the hypervigilance of wondering which spaces are now safe to enter. Some have described a return of dysphoria that had been carefully managed. Others have found that the relentlessness of the public debate has made it harder to find any space that feels genuinely neutral.

This is what sustained minority stress looks like in practice. It is not fragility. It is a response to a real and ongoing threat to dignity and safety.

What Therapy Can Offer

Therapy is not a solution to political reality. It cannot change what is happening in law or in culture. But it can offer something that is currently in short supply: a space where your identity is simply not up for debate.

Affirming therapy starts from the position that you are the authority on your own experience. It offers somewhere to process what you are carrying — the grief, the anger, the fear, the exhaustion of existing in a body and an identity that others seem determined to argue about. It can also be a place to think about how to protect your wellbeing and what you need in order to stay grounded in yourself when the external noise is loudest.

You do not have to be in crisis to deserve that support. If the current climate is affecting how you feel about yourself, your safety, or your capacity to move through the world, that is reason enough.

At Mamta Ward Counselling, I offer trans-affirming therapy for individuals and couples, in Bromley and online. I hold Pink Therapy accreditation and work with gender identity, LGBTQ+ experience, and the intersection of identity and mental health. There is no debate about who you are in this space. If you'd like to talk, I'd be glad to hear from you.